[Zope] Questions concerning development in Zope

[Iwan van der Kleyn]

I work as senior developer/architect for a software development company 
in The Netherlands which focusses its activitites on web-development 
with J2EE, DOT.NET and PHP.  Development in Zope/Python has never been 
an option for management because yet another platform would be too much 
of an investment considering Zope's minimal market share in Holland. 
Besides, the  mindshare of Python at our premises is nill apart from 
myself. However, recently  a customer has shown great interest in Zope 
(thanks to some slick presentation of Plone) and they are willing to 
make a signicant investment. I'm now in the rather weird position of 
having to win the sceptics over to join the Zope fray. To be perfectly 
honest, I have some lingering doubts and uncertainties. So therefore I 
would like to pose the following questions regarding development in Zope:

 * Zope is often criticised for its perceived lack of documentation. 
Although the current Zope book seems to have improved greatly, I still 
miss a good reference guide/book on advanded topics (the Development 
Guide seems to have stuck at version 2.4 and is rather limited). Which 
book(s) can fullfill this role?

 * Zope seems to lack a dominant development methodology/paradigm. 
DOT.NET has got form-based ASP.NET/ADO.NET, Java has MVC with 
Struts/J2EE, PHP has either form-based or MVC with Pear/Smarty. What 
shoudl I use in Zope? ZTP with Scripts? Or external Methods? ZCLasses? 
Products?

 * Releated to the former question: ASP.NET and PHP (through Pear) 
excell in easy (fast!) form-based development. What functionality can 
Zope offer? I've seen some references to a " Formulator"  product.

 * Plone seems to be all the rage. But is Plone usable as an application 
framework? Can I use Plone for form-based, data-driven applications?

 * Thanks to Python's Global Interpreter Lock, Python programs don't 
scale well on SMP systems. Which is a "must have"  in our situation. I' 
ve found some references to using ZEO to circumvent this, effectively 
running multiple instances of Zope on one server. Is there any 
documentation to be found on this subject? And how proven is this solution?

 * And finally (which makes me come across somowhat like a Troll, sorry 
about that :-). What is the "life expectancy" of Zope? Most of the hype 
regarding Zope seems to have died away somewhat. Recently its coming 
back in the slipstream of Plone. But realistically, what are the chances 
of Zope being a *relevant* application platform in a couple of years 
time? WIth "relevant"  I mean: a platform which is well supported and 
keeps up with the compettition on *features*, not necessarilly market 
share.

Many thanks,

Iwan